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512mb of ram with vista
noise747
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Why oh why do computer manufacturers do this? I am sorting out a Acer laptop, a celeron cpu and 512Mmb of ram running vista, it is as slow as a dog. Why on earth Acer did not stick even 1Gb in i have no idea, memory is not that expensive even when this laptop was new.
Having a Celeron chip don't help mind you, thankfully it is only a reset to factory settings and update, I can't get the wi-fi connecting as it should yet, tells me it is local only. so updating via ethernet and then sort that out, maybe the drivers for the wi-fi will be updated and may work then.
I hate slow computers
Having a Celeron chip don't help mind you, thankfully it is only a reset to factory settings and update, I can't get the wi-fi connecting as it should yet, tells me it is local only. so updating via ethernet and then sort that out, maybe the drivers for the wi-fi will be updated and may work then.
I hate slow computers
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The obvious reason why such low spec PCs were sold is cost. Punters going into PC World etc. wanted the cheapest PC they could get.
as you say there were paper thin margins on these machines. and vista ran ok out of the box. it was only when you started actually using them to do stuff that there was a problem.
Market segmentation and product differentiation. When people are prepared to pay for shite, they will get shite. Upping the RAM to 1GB is neither necessary nor desirable.
Dave
Agreed. I've fixed and used several Vista machines with 1GB of RAM and they all run like a dog. I've wanted to throw all of those machines out the window That's one reason why I hate Vista.
Customers are the cheap ones.
A lot of them are, especially the type who buy Currys PC World's finest. They probably think they're getting a great deal but what happens when it snuffs it a year or two later? And their warranty is ridiculous. I always buy my computers (both Macs and PCs) from John Lewis. They might be more expensive but their customer service is excellent.
Explaining TCO (total cost of ownership) to some people is useless....they want to spend as little as possible on an item and then are surprised when it fails after a couple of years and those are the sort of people who buy £300 cars hoping that they'll get a few years out of them even though its rusted to hell but at £300 its worth it
In my experience there hasn't been a cost difference between the 2 OSes. The only reason I could think Packard Bell may have done it is because Vista 64 didn't have the same level of support that 7 64 does.
I bet they're all running Vista :eek::D You should take the sledgehammer to all of those rubbishy laptops. And Acer laptops are crap. My dad had one and it snuffed it after only two years! They should last longer than that.
We have over 500 Acer laptops at work and they are great. Some going strong still after being bought in 2006.
Two weeks later, they'd bring in their laptops for me to have a friendly "look at". Of course, the things were paging constantly and were dog slow. It didn't help that they were (are?) buggers to get the backs off (to put in more RAM).
I planned and executed a corporate Vista rollout (very limited budget = public sector/charity) and we settled on 2GB as the minimum for legacy machines. New ones we were buying at 4GB at that point.
Some companies never learn though.... Many high cost desktops with XP only had 128mb ram, Dell and their RDRAM was a favourite, I had a customer that paid about £1500 for Dell desktop with 1.8GHZ P4, 128RDRam and 15" LCD and it ran like a 1 legged drugged dog. Finding RDRam a couple years later was near impossible other than via ebay.
My own laptop a aspire 5630 was also sold with 512Mb of ram, but it did run XP at the time and it also have a dual core processor, I updated it to 2 Gig and then put a update of vista and then it ran like a dog again.
Sorry, Vista is not that great to be honest.
Ok back to this 3680, I now got it working, so back it goes to the owner, but it took so long to update, i am glad i did not have to do anything to it and just leave it to update.
You may be right about the 256MB - it was probably 512MB. Certainly under 1GB though.
We never had any trouble at work with it with 2GB. These were nice clean corporate installs from a .WIM though - not the crap-laden things that you buy from OEM retail.
Crikey, my graphics card is mental in terms of size, I dont see how anything that size could ever fit into a laptop, and over the years the insides appear to be getting bigger and bigger, something laptops are not built to deal with.
Also, I too work in computer repairs and by and large, its cheap free laptops I deal with. Those ones you get free with a mobile contract, always some awful brand, poor drivers, no power whatsoever to deal with the endless streams of cheap crap hidden object games and the endless toolbars. The endless endless toolbars, why do they need so many programs to start up with windows, why do they even use windows if they do not game, just use linux, its easier and cheaper. Dear god the toolbars, why do toolbars even exists?! why do they download music illegally with file names like "Britnay Speers all ALBUMS.exe - Size 18kbs" and wonder why their crap laptops have more virus's than a Thia lady boy 20 years into the game. OH MORE TOOLBARS! HAVE 9 DIFFERENT PRINTER APPLICATIONS STARTING WITH WINDOWS, THAT WILL HELP!
Sorry, flashbacks :P
Wow that's pretty old! I know loads of people who have had trouble with Acer laptops though.
Maybe they're business models rather than consumer ones bought from the likes of PC World?